According to Newsweek's accounts last week of how the article came
about, Michael Isikoff, the magazine's best-known investigative
reporter, became aware that a Pentagon probe was under way and phoned
"a longtime reliable source, a senior U.S. government official who
was knowledgeable about the matter." The source told him that the
report would contain the Koran incident. Looking for confirmation,
Isikoff approached a spokesman for the Pentagon's Southern Command,
which operates the Guantanamo prison. The spokesman declined to
comment. John Barry, the magazine's national-security correspondent,
took the unusual step of providing a draft of the item to a "senior
Defense official." According to Newsweek's account, the official
challenged one part of the article, which did not involve the Koran
allegation, but "was silent about the rest." After revising the
portion the official had challenged, Newsweek published the item.

Within days, news of its report spread throughout the Muslim world.

Protests erupted in Pakistan and Afghanistan, though how much was
actually attributable to outrage over the Newsweek story is a matter
of dispute. Opponents of the U.S.-supported government of Hamid
Karzai in Afghanistan may have seized on the report to stir up
trouble. On May 12, U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
General Richard Myers said the U.S. military believed that the riots
were not triggered by the Newsweek report. Six days later, he
elaborated, stating that in the view of Lieut. General Karl
Eikenberry, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, "the unrest had been
previously planned" but that the Newsweek story "certainly wasn't
helpful." First Lady Laura Bush, traveling to Jordan, said she
thought the report had been only part of the cause.

Whatever the spark, after the disturbances broke out, the Pentagon
reviewed details of its Guantanamo probe and concluded that
investigators were not even examining the toilet-flushing allegation.

Defense Department spokesman Lawrence Di Rita called Newsweek on May
13 to say the story was wrong. Four days later, he told reporters
there were no credible allegations of Koran abuse to look into.
News professionals around the country were somewhat hesitant last
week to second-guess Newsweek's editorial judgments. They don't need
to be told that even the most conscientious among them can make an
error. But many believe the magazine made a series of questionable
judgments that together led it into trouble.

For one thing, Newsweek's "Periscope" section, which features newsy
tidbits, is scrutinized less closely than the rest of the magazine.

Whitaker conceded last week that because those items are short and
often develop late in the week, "there are one or two layers of
editing and review that are not there," compared with articles
elsewhere in the magazine. That's no excuse, says Daniel Okrent, who
just ended an 18-month stint as "public editor"basically, the
internal criticof the New York Times. "It doesn't say at the top of
that page 'Stuff that we didn't check as much.'"

Newsweek was also playing with fire by relying on a single, anonymous
source to support such a provocative claim. In this case, the source
was presuming to describe a still unpublished report that neither the
Newsweek correspondent nor the source possessed. "You're trying to
predict what's going to be in a document that hasn't yet been
written," says Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Graduate School of
Journalism at Columbia University. "If you have one source who says,
'I'm sitting in an office right now looking at the report,' and then
they read you the page, then I'd say, 'Can you fax it to me?' Under
those conditions I'd be willing to go with one source."